NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Stephen Joyce, a grandson and last surviving direct descendant of James Joyce and the formidably rigid gatekeeper of that Irish author’s coveted literary estate, died Jan. 23 on Île de Ré, an island resort on the west coast of France, where he lived. He was 87.

President Michael Higgins of Ireland, confirming the death in a statement, said Joyce had been “deeply committed to what he saw was the special duty to defend the legacy of the Joyce family in literary and personal terms,” although Higgins allowed that it was “not a task carried out in harmonious circumstances at all times.”

Stephen Joyce gleefully maintained an iron grip on his grandfather’s printed works, unpublished manuscripts, letters and other material, although his hold loosened somewhat on the 70th anniversary of James Joyce’s death, when most copyrights on his masterpieces like “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” expired. He said he was safeguarding the materials’ literary integrity and defending them from critics and biographers, whom he likened to “rats and lice” that “should be exterminated.”

“I am not only protecting and preserving the purity of my grandfather’s work but also what remains of the much-abused privacy of the Joyce family,” he told The New Yorker in 2006.

With most legal constraints lifted and the material controlled by Stephen Joyce now part of his estate, its fate uncertain, the most likely immediate impact of his grandson’s death will be the freeing of aggrieved scholars to ventilate, without fear of retribution, about how Joyce had thwarted their research for decades.

“I think now there will be more open reflection on the role Stephen Joyce played in impeding so many projects,” Anne Fogarty, director of the James Joyce Research Centre at University College Dublin, wrote in an email. “He saw himself as gatekeeper but was very often quite obstructive.”

Hans Walter Gabler, a German Joycean who edited a critical edition of “Ulysses” in 1984, began that reflection bluntly. In an email, he accused Stephen Joyce of having exercised his vigilance over the Joyce archive “with a vengeance,” and that “with refusals of permission and/or exorbitant fee requests, he terrorized scholars and critics as well as publishers into passivity and nonaction in an attitude of ‘anticipatory obedience.’”

Joyce’s penchant for privacy was inherited. James Joyce had meticulously vetted his own official biographer and dismissed prospective profilers as “biografiends.”

His litigious grandson went well beyond that, though, suppressing publication and performances of copyrighted material, barring access to many private papers and even expunging others.

In 1988, he stunned Joyce scholars who had convened in Vienna by revealing that he had destroyed about 1,000 letters he had received from his Aunt Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter, who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love.

“No one was going to set their eyes on them and re-psychoanalyze my poor aunt,” Joyce told The New York Times that year. “She went through enough of that when she was alive.”

He added: “I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.”

Echoing questions posed by other families besieged by biographers, he asked: “Where do you draw the line? Do you have any right to privacy?” He went one step further, though, adding: “What are people going to do to stop me?”

Stephen James Joyce was born Feb. 15, 1932, in Paris.

To celebrate Stephen’s birth and to mourn his own father’s recent death, James Joyce composed the poem “Ecce Puer,” literally translated as “Behold the Young Boy.” It included this passage:

Calm in his cradle

The living lies.

May love and mercy

Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed

On the glass;

The world that was not

Comes to pass.

Stephen’s father, Giorgio Joyce, the author’s only son and a would-be singer, was Irish. (At his death, Stephen had only recently become an Irish citizen.) Giorgio abandoned the family when Stephen was 6. His mother, Helen (Kastor) Joyce, a New Yorker of German Jewish heritage, suffered from depression; she later returned to the United States.

“As Stevie grew older I loved to watch him crawling onto his grandfather’s knee and asking him grave little questions,” Helen Joyce later wrote in an unpublished memoir. Her father-in-law, she added, “was infinitely patient with him and was always willing to stop and talk to him or to answer as he grew older his incessant ‘whys.’”

Stephen was raised in France, New York and Switzerland, where, as their only grandchild, he lived with James and Nora Joyce. (James Joyce died when Stephen was almost 9.)

Stephen spent his high school years at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, where he wrote an essay in 1948 about his grandfather, titled “The Man Whom I Loved and Respected Most in This World.” Admitted to Harvard in 1950, he took eight years to graduate.

He married Solange Raythchine in 1955; she died in 2016. The couple lived on Île de Ré, off the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle, and had no children.

For more than three decades Joyce was a midlevel, self-described “international civil servant” for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a global research and advocacy organization based in Paris. He focused on sub-Saharan Africa. He retired in 1991 to become the full-time Joyce executor and literary executioner.

English had been his worst subject in school, he said, and at first he was intimidated by his grandfather’s novels, which have often confounded even committed Joyceans for nearly a century since “Ulysses” was published. Joyce and “Ulysses” are commemorated annually on Bloomsday, June 16 — both the anniversary of his first outing with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and the date on which the novel takes place in 1904 as it follows, and delves inside, the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his day.

When Stephen Joyce finally got around to reading his grandfather’s books (“I am a Joyce, not a Joycean,” he liked to say), he was surprised, he said, that the denser ones, like “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake,” were not so baffling after all.

His refusals to grant access to the Joyce archive could seem arbitrary. He rejected the request of one author whose work was being published by Purdue University because he deemed the nickname of Purdue’s sports teams, the Boilermakers, vulgar.

When a 23-year-old Irish composer wanted to use 18 words from what his request identified as “Finnegan’s Wake,” Joyce’s denial arrived accompanied by a spelling lesson (“Its ‘Finnegans Wake,’” he wrote back, apparently deliberately misspelling “it’s”) and added, to boot, “To put it politely and mildly, my wife and I don’t like your music.”

In 1989, Joyce required Brenda Maddox, the author of “Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom,” to delete an epilogue on Lucia Joyce in exchange for permission to quote other Joyce material in the book.

In 2000, the Joyce estate demanded a royalty payment of $40,000 for a public reading of a letter from Beckett to Joyce to celebrate Bloomsday. The Beckett estate had asked for $30.

And in 2004, after Joyce threatened to block an exhibition of his grandfather’s manuscripts for the centenary of Bloomsday, the Irish Senate hurriedly amended the country’s copyright law to allow it.

Why was Joyce so protective of his grandfather’s legacy? Professional scholars, he told The New Yorker, are “people who want to brand this great work with their mark.”

“I don’t accept that,” he said.

To be sure, James Joyce himself had fervently guarded the integrity of his work, and his vigilant grandson looked to him for guidance. Helen Joyce wrote that when Stephen had to make vital decisions about the estate, he would go to Joyce’s gravesite in Zurich to consult him.

Still, it could be said that the struggle between the estate and Joyceans was generated by the author himself. After all, it was his modernist, thorny, often opaque writing that propelled critics and scholars to scour his private papers looking for clues in the first place.

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” Joyce once said, “and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

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